In May, Navistar International Corp. named Bill Kozek, a 26-year veteran of Paccar, as president of Navistar's North America Truck and Parts business. He succeeded Jack Allen, who was promoted to chief operating officer. Kozek spoke with HDT Editor in Chief Deborah Lockridge shortly after the company announced disappointing fourth-quarter earnings. Here's the Q&A.

Over the years, electrical failures have been the number one problem with trailers. Lighting problems have been reduced by the wider adoption of LED lighting. However, even LEDs, along with the rest of the electrical system, are subject to corrosion, which remains a major headache.

Mobile computing is quickly becoming the platform of choice. Tablets and smartphones are far outselling laptop or desktop computers in the consumer market, and a growing number of trucking operations are deploying these devices.

Is trucking in for a transformation? Many believe that long-haul trucking will become less important as regional operations grow and intermodal takes over more long-haul freight, and that will change the type of heavy-duty tractor bought by many trucking companies.

Can we depend on the fuel-saving numbers provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s SmartWay program? Executive Contributing Editor Rolf Lockwood says he's not so sure, in the aftermath of a recent test results story.

‘May you live in interesting times” is usually taken as a wry Chinese curse. But for cargo vans and the people who run them, an interesting era is here and it should be a blessing. New European-based products are being sent to the marketplace, and they’ll offer new efficiencies and choices in a segment that has languished design-wise since the first of that breed.

Lightweighting. You’ll hear this word a lot in the next few years. It refers to engineering efforts to slice weight from just about every single component on a truck or tractor in the name of fuel efficiency. And where better to start than with a truck’s backbone, its frame?

Is this single-rear-axle truck the type of medium-heavy-duty model that Mack should have brought out first? I asked that question two years ago when I saw the initial offering, the tandem-axle Granite MHD. I figured other than the tandem, it was just right for municipal fleets and others who don’t need high carrying capacity.

Powers Distributing, Lake Orion, Mich., was the first company to buy a significant number of diesel-electric hybrid trucks using the Eaton Hybrid Power System. That may seem like a big jump for a relatively small fleet, but the 74-year-old company has a deep commitment to social responsibility and that includes sustainability.

In some fleets, shop operations are completely integrated with the computer systems for dispatch, accounting, mobile communications and outside service providers. In other fleets, technology in the shop may be limited to automated systems for tracking work, labor, parts and inventory.

Getting office-supply products to Staples’ 2,000-plus stores around the world and directly to business customers takes more than pushing an Easy button, even if Mike Payette, director for fleet equipment, has four of the advertising-theme props, “in four languages,” on his desk.

Not long ago I was at my desk looking to write about some aspect of where we’re heading. Then I flicked on the little TV beside me to watch the news, and what did I see but a piece about algae as a fuel source. Clearly a sign.

Wide-base tires aren’t cheap. Not that duals are cheaper, but in a single wide-base tire you have an investment approaching the cost of a pair of standard tires. Minimizing the life-cycle cost of those big wide tires almost demands that they be retreaded.

Volvo Trucks North America believes dimethyl ether, or DME, is the real fuel of the future, and the company intends to get it to market as a motor fuel by 2015 in Volvo VN models as well as Mack Pinnacle trucks from its sister company.

After more than 40 years of using propane as a motor fuel, the people at The Schwan Food Co. still believe they’ve got the right stuff. Schwan’s experience with propane goes back to the 1970s, when Arab oil embargoes threatened supplies of gasoline and diesel and drove up their prices.

A dual-fuel conversion system can offer some of the fuel- and emissions-saving benefits of a natural gas engine without going out and buying a brand-new truck. Read more in this story from the September issue of HDT.

My drive of the Cummins Wesport ISX12 G was at a mid-July “natural gas summit” hosted by Kenworth at its plant in Chillicothe, Ohio. A half-dozen gas-powered KWs built for different applications were offered to dealers, customers and press reporters for inspection and evaluation. A few fellows with CDLs, like me, took them for drives, and I had – how shall I say? – a learning experience while in a T800 short-haul daycab tractor pulling a 53-foot van trailer.

Freightliner’s Cascadia 113 and the ISX12 G from Cummins Westport aren’t exactly strangers. About 100 of the trucks have been in customer hands for some months now. Equipment Editor Jim Park takes one for a spin.

At its most basic level, a work truck is a piece of equipment that helps your employees do their jobs. Since well-designed equipment enhances productivity, your objective when designing a work truck is to optimize the vehicle to achieve the best overall return for dollar spent.

Says the butcher: “We eat what we sell.” Says Kwik-Trip: “We burn what we sell.” That’s natural gas, sold in liquefied and compressed form at 15 of the 430 retail filling stations the company operates in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.

Natural gas. Biodiesel. Dimethyl ether. Hybrid. Electric. Algae-based diesel. Hydrogen fuel cells. There’s a virtual smorgasbord of available and potential fuel sources to power medium- and heavy-duty trucks. The critical question becomes which one, or which combination of fuel sources, represent the best path for fleets, manufacturers and the industry.

It’s not uncommon to find highway trucks with front axles and suspensions rated for 13,200 pounds. While 12,000-pound axles were the industry norm for many years, the move to 13,200-pound axles came with the addition of all that emissions reduction gear. Are you running a steer tire rated for that weight?

During the early years of the Great Recession, almost all trailer manufacturers experienced a sharp drop in demand for their wares. Dry bulk pneumatic trailers, however, were about to get a boon. Read more about the state of the dry bulk pneumatic trailer segment, how fracking has affected the industry, plus trailer-spec’ing tips.

Time is money, and that’s the essence of a front-discharge mixer. It drives right up to where concrete’s needed and, after the driver adds chute extensions, starts offloading. Terex/Advance Mixer in Fort Wayne, Ind., makes rear-discharge drums for mounting on conventional truck chassis, but its heart is in the front-discharge version that it builds all-new and as glider kits.

Power inverters – the devices that convert standard battery (DC) power to AC household power – are becoming more commonplace in the trucking industry. Depending upon whom you ask, that’s to the delight, or chagrin of fleet and maintenance managers, who often have a love/hate relationship with inverters.

Coming up: another “non-event” for brakes? That’s what Phase Two of new federal stopping-distance requirements will be for truck operators, according to people we talked with. Stronger, higher-performance brakes on certain vehicles won’t even cost much more in most cases. But like Phase One two years ago, which was hardly noticed by truckers, Phase Two represents a lot of work for brake makers and truck builders.

Whether it's dumps or dry vans, flatbeds or tank trailers, trailer makers have been focusing on making trailers lighter to improve freight capacity and fuel efficiency, safer for drivers, and stronger to extend the trailer’s life cycle. We contacted trailer manufacturers and learned about the latest in trailers, manufacturing, product innovations and corporate news.

A research team from Georgia Tech compared medium-duty electric and diesel urban delivery trucks for a range of scenarios and discovered the total costs of ownership were very similar – but the cost-competitiveness of the electric truck drops in drive cycles with higher average speed.

Traditional thinking on automated manual transmissions has it that AMTs are the great equalizers – bridgers of skill gaps between the best and the worst drivers in the fleet. While that’s still true, AMTs now bring even more to the fuel-economy table, offering fuel savings in their own right beyond what even the most professionally driven manual transmission could accomplish.

You know that it’s time to upgrade a certain portion of your fleet. But you assume that, in the current economic environment, getting credit can be difficult. So how do you get the equipment you need, when you need it?

You get 30% less tread on some fuel-efficient tires, they cost 15% less up front and they run fewer miles to take-off, but does the money saved on fuel because of the lower rolling resistance make up for the shorter overall life?
Many fleets are struggling with that question today. The answer is often anything but clear.

You probably have a pretty good idea what a telematics system is, even if you don't know it by that name. You may know it as a fleet management system or GPS fleet management system or GPS vehicle tracking system.

It takes special people to be flatbedders. Tarping, however, is usually not on their list of favorite activities.
A single tarpaulin can weigh 65 to 100 pounds or more. It must be half thrown and half dragged over the load, spread evenly with corners properly folded and tucked in, and the whole piece of slippery fabric secured with straps and bungies.

Equipment Editor Jim Park still recalls his first meeting with a T800. It was in the fall of'86, the year the truck was introduced and a little more than a year after the T600 had made its game-changing debut.

The day after its introduction in Dusseldorf, in northern Germany, we reporters had a chance to drive Mercedes-Benz’s new Sprinter van for a few hours on various surfaces, from a test track to a dirt road and on a nearby Autobahn.

Everything you need to know about switching from dual wheels to wide-base singles you can learn at a playground.
Picture a teeter-totter with a big kid on one end and a little kid on the other. The big kid is on the ground, while the little guy's legs are dangling in the air. The load is unevenly distributed. If you moved the fulcrum closer to the big kid, the beam would eventually balance.

It's still an oddball spec in road tractors, but some believe the 6x2 — a single drive axle with two powered wheels among six total wheel positions — will someday become more common as truck operators look for ways to save fuel and cut tare weight.

Greening a fleet can be a daunting prospect, but as fuel prices continue to rise, the opportunity to save money has increased. Significant and easily accessible funding is now available in California through the Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP)

Ten years ago, you could buy a decent steer tire for $300. Not anymore. But, then again, you're not buying the same tire anymore either.
Long-term pricing trends show that the cost of raw materials used in tire manufacturing has gone up over the past decade, along with the shelf prices for tires, but consumers haven't seen the price swings for tires that manufacturers have seen for materials over the same period of time.

Drayage operators will soon obtain more container chassis from trucker-owned pools than from ship lines and railroads, which signals part of a transition under way in the intermodal industry.
A recently formed North American Chassis Pool Cooperative has won government approval and has begun purchasing chassis.

Red engines have been fixtures under Navistar hoods since the late ‘90s. Except for the recent hiatus, you have to go back some 75 years to the days when Cummins and International trucks weren't almost synonymous in North America.